Third-Party Voters Know What They Want

On Tuesday night, two men who want to be vice president will face off in a debate. If Bill Weld had his way, he’d be up on that stage, too.

Mr. Weld, who served as governor of Massachusetts in the 1990s, is running as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential pick this year, alongside Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. Last week, Mr. Weld spoke to students and supporters at Temple University in Philadelphia. Outside Morgan Hall, two students wearing Gary Johnson shirts directed people to the event.

A group of young white men wearing baseball caps walked past, saw the Gary Johnson shirts, and jeered: “What’s Aleppo?”

One of Mr. Johnson’s supporters, Alex Pack, rolled his eyes. Were those guys Trump supporters?

The Trump bros were referring, of course, to Mr. Johnson’s recent gaffe, in which he didn’t know what the epicenter of the Syrian civil war was. Then, at an MSNBC town hall last week, Mr. Johnson couldn’t name his favorite foreign leader. “I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment,” he said.

“I thought it was an honest mistake that got blown way out of proportion,” said Tom Byrnes, a junior philosophy major at Temple who supports the Libertarian candidate.

Mr. Johnson’s gaffe may not have gotten much coverage in another election year, but this year is different. Party loyalists, political forecasters and academics alike are all looking at third-party candidates with voracious interest.

The simple explanation for this is that the two major-party nominees — Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton — are two of the least-liked presidential nominees in recent history. But more than that, there is more impetus for disaffected voters to send a message to political elites, that they’ve weighed their options and don’t like either of them.

In more than 30 interviews with third-party voters, few of them said they genuinely thought that Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were equally bad candidates, though some seem to truly believe that they are two sides of the same coin. Instead, these voters view their decision as a way of wresting political power away from two fundamentally corrupt parties.

Aside from their protest vote, they have another message: Don’t blame me for President Trump.

Much has been made of the fact that younger voters support third-party candidates at higher rates than older voters. In 2012, voters ages 18 to 29 voted for President Obama over Mitt Romney by 2-to-1. This year, there is a much larger share of undecided young voters heading into the election, and Mrs. Clinton’s support among likely voters under 30 drops by 10 points in four-way polls. But this line of reasoning ignores the bigger picture: Millennials still support Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Trump by a large margin, and at a higher rate than every older demographic. So maybe baby boomers and Gen-Xers should spend less time scolding their daughters for voting for Ms. Stein, and more time berating their dads for voting for Mr. Trump.

For some third-party voters, a logical paradox exists at the core of their decision-making process: The surer they are that Mrs. Clinton will win in November, the more confident they are voting for someone else. According to the polling firm YouGov, half of third-party voters believe Mrs. Clinton will win, compared with 15 percent who think Mr. Trump will.

Casting a protest vote is a tantalizing option for many: It gives you the veneer of moral purity while sacrificing nothing. In a normal election year, voters are often given the option to choose between two less-than-desirable options — would you like chicken or fish as your in-flight meal? In 2008, David Sedaris famously described an undecided voter contemplating the choice between the chicken and something I can’t mention here, mixed with ground glass. Voting for a third party this year is like being given the option between chicken and the plane crashing into the side of a mountain, but calmly asking for a banana split instead.

It’s still too early for pro-Clinton Democrats to wet the proverbial bed; third-party voters are a lot more pragmatic than some may seem (or sound). While the conventional wisdom about young third-party voters is that they are mindlessly throwing their votes away, many of the voters I talked to had thought long and hard about the efficacy of their vote, factoring in the partisanship of their home state. It’s easy for a Jill Stein voter in New York, or a Gary Johnson voter in Oklahoma, to rationalize his or her vote, which is likely to do little to swing their state’s electoral outcome.

“If I lived in a swing state, I would not hesitate to vote for Clinton over Trump, and I would be able to leave the polls with a relatively clear conscience,” said Caleb Hicks, a 27-year-old architect who plans to vote for Ms. Stein, the Green Party candidate, in garnet-red Louisiana. “I’m going to vote my conscience, and maybe pull the D.N.C. a little farther to the left next time around.”

While young voters like Mr. Johnson’s liberal stances on the war on drugs and criminal justice reform, his economic policies are straight from the trickle-down playbook. Mr. Johnson opposes Wall Street regulation and a minimum-wage increase, has promised to eliminate corporate and income taxes, opposes paid family leave, and supports the Keystone XL pipeline, the trans-Pacific Partnership, corporate political donations and a “free market approach to health care.” He believes in human-made climate change, but he doesn’t see it as a pressing threat because, as he said in 2011, “in billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the earth.”

While Mr. Sanders did not win the Democratic nomination, he succeeded enormously in pushing Mrs. Clinton to the left on issues like college affordability and the minimum wage. But third-party voters on the left and the right agree that Mrs. Clinton can’t be trusted to keep her promises.

In deep-blue bastions like New York, California, Washington and Vermont, there’s virtually no downside to voting third-party — though if both houses of Congress remain in Republican control, the popular vote will matter much more than it usually does. Paul Nelson, 55, directs a poetry lab in Seattle. He supported Mr. Sanders in the Democratic primary, and now plans to vote for Ms. Stein.

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“I think voting ‘strategically,’ like my white liberal friends are suggesting I do, is really capitulation to an ever-slipping standard of living in this country,” he said.

Mr. Nelson would have followed Mr. Sanders to the ends of the earth, except he won’t heed the Vermont senator’s plea to vote for Mrs. Clinton. (In the immortal words of Meat Loaf: “I would do anything for love/but I won’t do that.”)

Claudia Stauber, 45, is an author who builds log cabins in Vermont. She supported Mr. Sanders “wholeheartedly” in the Democratic primary, and thinks the nomination was stolen from him. She said that if Mr. Trump were elected, “I will not feel any worse than if Hillary Clinton would have gotten elected.” She added that Mrs. Clinton “is very scary to me because I feel we will have more wars, and our climate is just as much in peril with her as with Trump.”

David Page, 21, a student at the University of North Carolina, said he didn’t want Mr. Trump to become president, but could not bring himself to vote for Mrs. Clinton. Instead, he will write in Kanye West’s name for president, because “that seems a lot more fun than just skipping the presidency all together, or voting for Stein or Johnson, who are both their own types of crazy.”

Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are locked in a dead heat in North Carolina, which holds 15 Electoral College votes.

Patrick Cleary, a sophomore at Ohio State University, plans to vote for Ms. Stein for both practical and symbolic reasons. If Ms. Stein receives 5 percent of the vote this year, the Green Party will qualify for partial public funding in 2020. And he wants to use his protest vote to send a message that there is support for a larger left-wing movement in the United States.

“You only get one chance every four years to send an actual message to the executive branch,” Mr. Cleary said. “My message is that what they’re offering isn’t good enough, and that they need to start listening to people like Jill Stein.”

Polls in Ohio, which holds 18 electoral votes, show a slight but persistent advantage for Mr. Trump.

Max Holland, 24, works in a Virginia law firm and says he is voting for Ms. Stein to deny Mrs. Clinton a clear mandate.

“I’m unwilling to allow my vote, out of fear, to contribute to a mandate which allows a President Clinton 45 to rapidly degrade the basic protections of the Constitution while simultaneously engaging in ever more and sundry costly wars,” he said in an email. “I will use my vote to erode, and hopefully deny, that mandate. I believe she will still win in spite of me.”

For now, Mrs. Clinton is maintaining a comfortable lead in Virginia, which has 13 electoral votes.

Whether or not you agree with their reasoning, Republicans, and especially Democrats, should listen to what third-party voters have to say. They aren’t going to go away, and neither are their concerns. Better to at least try to sweep them back under the big tent than cast them into the wilderness.

Justin Oeltze, a 42-year-old equity trader in Georgia — which Democrats could put into play for the first time in decades — is voting for the first time this year for Mr. Johnson. He said a Trump presidency would be worse at the onset, but would hopefully be constrained by the government’s system of checks and balances — and his possible impeachment.

“I’ll be a little surprised” if Mr. Trump wins, Mr. Oeltze said, “but my life won’t ostensibly change no matter who is president.”

Greg Bates, a writer in Virginia who plans to vote for Ms. Stein, said the blame rested not with third-party voters, but with the two major parties for failing to win them over. Still, he admits that he has much less to lose under a Trump administration than others do.

“As a straight white male, it’s not likely that Donald Trump’s policies would hurt me too much personally — but all of my friends who are women, African-American, Hispanic, LGBT, etc. — I would feel awful for them,” he wrote in an email.

He added that he doesn’t think it’s Mrs. Clinton’s job to rescue us from a Trump presidency; “it’s the voters’ job to choose the best candidate for office — ideally, someone who won’t make the next four years a nightmarish hellscape.”

Voters like Mr. Bates still have 35 days to decide if voting for a third party is the best way to prevent that nightmare scenario from becoming a reality.

Emma Roller (@EmmaRoller), a former reporter for National Journal, is a contributing opinion writer.